Annals of Western Drought Department: Difficult and Encouraging Impacts, 2016

Over the past decade or so I’ve become aware of the increasingly dry situation in the west, not just above ground, but below ground, with shrinking aquifers. I think about all the people who live there, and all who are still emigrating there, despite the sustained drought.

We have the opposite situation here in Bloomington, Indiana: too much rain. Were the electricity (fans, air conditioning) to go out, my basement would be quickly devoured in mold.

So we cross our fingers, no matter where we live, pray for relief, release. Pray for deliverance. Or not!

I’m not one who prays. Instead, I ponder, and I set strong, clear, conscious intentions in motion — and then I act, responding to invitations — whether stated or not, whether visible or not — that surge towards me in response to those intentions and actions. In this way, I prepare for whatever; the single goal of all my efforts being resilience, which I see as the ability of an environment to absorb, contain, and creatively integrate and transform outside (or inside) shocks of any kind.

For me, that “environment” is multidimensional — physical, emotional, mental, spiritual — spreading out — and in — from my own small vulnerable body, this resonant heart-based center — as a pulsating series of rings connecting me to Earth and Earthlings, Earth to Sun, Sun to Galaxy to Cosmos — on out to infinity.

I see the precious lives of others in the same manner, each one the center of the entire multiverse, inhaling and exhaling all that surrounds and fills the within. We are in communion with our environment, and with each other, surrendered to accelerating universal energies. This powerful energetic emergence torques yet unconscious souls into frozen fear and/or vitriolic hatred and violence, and this powerful energetic emergence rewards souls who center themselves in conscious awareness into immense, highly creative and transformative generosity that forgives and includes all “transgressions” as actions that test us, for resilience, for our capacity to care, for our loving kinship with the cosmic divine.

So, too dry in the west, too wet in the midwest. What’s new?

What’s new in the west is an increasing awareness of the impacts of human activity on nature’s abundance, including her ever-flowing waters, which we have taken way too much for granted, and have poisoned with impunity. No longer is that universally true.

Here’s an article about the drought in California now, after five years.